Monday, August 26, 2013

One of the joys of working in an archive, for archivists and
researchers, is coming across tantalizing mysteries. A huge range of women have
donated to The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, ranging from public figures like
Margarethe Cammermeyer to lesser-known, but no less historically important,
women. Occasionally, a very intriguing collection will come with a minimum of
identifying information about the woman to whom it belonged. I interviewed
Stacy E. Wood, a Graduate Student Researcher working on processing the Mazer
collections for UCLA, about one such collection: The Martha Foster Collection.

While looking through the Mazer holdings at UCLA, Wood came
across Foster’s papers, which included a small amount of poetry and many
striking photographs, taken in her backyard in Echo Park in the early 1930s. “They’re really gorgeous,” says Wood. “They almost look like
test costume shots. There are hundreds of them. And I couldn’t find any
information about her. Even Angela Brinskele (photographer and board member of the Mazer Archive) couldn’t find a death certificate or birth dates.”

Wood became fascinated with Foster, and went above and
beyond the call of duty to find out more about her. She and Brinskele emailed
friends and colleagues to try and unravel the mystery. Wood even went to
Foster’s house to inquire about her.

“There was one letter with her old address on it,” says
Wood. “So I went to her house and asked [about her], in case maybe her
grandkids lived there. I felt really strange about my pilgrimage to her house,
but I did it anyway! I went and knocked on their door, asked if they knew the
previous owner, and said her name. They said no, and I took it at face value.”

Wood had given up on solving the mysteries of Martha Foster.
However, six months later, strictly by coincidence, a new clue emerged.

“There is an accordion room divider at The Mazer‘s
headquarters in West Hollywood, and it’s from the Esther Bentley collection. It
is sort of a collage that she’s done. It’s called ‘The Women in My Life,’ and
it’s rumored to be all of her ex-girlfriends. Peeking out, I saw Martha
Foster’s face, and I freaked out, because this meant that she was sort of real
and had real connections, and maybe I could find something about her.”

To her surprise, as Wood continued processing various Mazer
collections, more fragments of information and memorabilia about Foster began
to emerge.

“Looking through Esther Bentley’s collection, I found
Martha’s ID card and some tax information about the house they shared in Echo
Park,” says Wood. “And then these other bits of her life were in another
person’s collection. Nobody at the Mazer knew that [any of these people] were
connected.”

So far as Wood can tell, The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive
contains the only evidence of Foster’s life.

“Angela has been tracking down everything for the
collection’s deeds, for legal purposes, and she even asked me to dig out Foster’s
tax document because it says that she died, and we can’t find out through the
city or online that she even existed. The only traces of her are in these
collections, and some of them are in her ex-girlfriend’s collection. But we
don’t know when they dated, or when they knew each other. There are just these
sort of weird suggestions.”

Foster’s relationship with Esther Bentley makes the lack of
information available about her even more confounding, as Bentley was a very
well-known and well-connected member of the Los Angeles LGBTQ community.

“That’s the weird thing,” says Wood. “We know almost
everything about her. Her collection is huge, everyone knew her. She was super
active in L.A., everyone at the Mazer knew her. There are all sorts of stories
about her. What’s strange is that the picture of Martha in the ex-girlfriend
collage was taken when she was older, so I assume people would have known her
or had some contact with her. But nobody knew her. She was with somebody who
was very known in the community, but she herself doesn’t have any ties. The
pictures are so beautiful. It’s like a silent film star posing in her
backyard, in these beautiful, sort of Moroccan prints. You imagine who was
taking those pictures, and you’ll never know. It drove me crazy for so long,
for so many months.”

Before she began processing the Mazer archives, Wood
anticipated that they’d contain more mysteries than they actually do. Her
assumption seemed to be confirmed when the first collection she processed
belonged to another very enigmatic subject named Tiger Woman. “Her poetry and some of her art work were in the collection,
and again she dated someone who ended up being a famous and recognized artist,”
says Wood. “I tried to contact the artist, and she would never respond to me. But
it was a situation that was really frustrating, because I had all of these
photos, and she felt more accessible because they were from the early 1990s. I
couldn’t believe that someone would just drop off the planet, and that there
was no trace of her.”

However, in spite of these archival mysteries, Wood has been
surprised at how comprehensive the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive is in its historicizing
of lesbian identities. She believes that the archive can be so comprehensive
because of its deep, strong roots in the community that it documents.

“Since Tiger Woman was the first collection I worked on, I
expected it to be the norm: some of it due to mystery, and some of it due to a
choice made by the subject of the collection,” says Wood. “A lot of people have
collections that they gave at times in their life, and now they have different
identities and politics. So I just expected it to be a little harder to pin
things down in a traditional archival way. But [such challenges] haven’t happened
as much as I would’ve thought, and I think that’s due to the organizational
structure of the Mazer and the grassroots nature of it. If you can’t find
something out, you activate the network, and it will come back to you. It might
not come back soon, but in nine months somebody will send a facebook message to
somebody else, and eventually it will come back to you: Here is what she is
doing now.”

Wood admits that her own personal tendency to become
passionately fascinated with the subjects of the collections she processes can
sometimes drive her crazy. At the same time, it likely makes her perfect for
the job. “I get very attached to the collections, and also sort of
like to communicate some sort of story [from them]. There are false hopes
attached to that desire. I think that especially with a project like this, when
the idea is unearthing these lost, hidden, or less public histories, it seems
even more important if you get almost obsessive about representing people in
whatever way you can. So it’s almost more frustrating when you can’t put a
picture together.”

Wood emphasizes that the more identifying information she
can find about a collection, the more potentially useful it will be to a
researcher. “Ultimately, it’s about people using this collection,” says
Wood. “If you think about it that way, it’s important to have as much
information as you can, so that people can know it’s there, and how they can
use it. It’s hard to fit that sort of affective sense [that surrounds
mysterious collections] into a finding aid. It’s hard to say: Oh, there are
these beautiful pictures, and they’d be great for artists, designers, and
period study, and there’s this poetry that’s not really great, but… It’s hard
to say why a collection is important without giving it shape or context. It’s
hard to piece it together.”

However, while there are abundant professional reasons for
solving the mysteries of the archive, Wood has become an excellent detective
because she loves the work. “I think I have some narrative greed, but that’s my own sort
of personal problem,” says Wood. “I think it is in a lot of ways a hindrance to
my actual job sometimes, because within the context of what we’re doing it’s
actually not always practically important to know all of the information that I
seek out. But it’s hard to work with these materials and not want to know.”

Ben Sher is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and a graduate student researcher at CSW.

The finding aid for this collection will soon be available for viewing at the Online Archive of California(http://www.oac.cdlib.org). Digitized materials from the collection and the finding aid will be available for viewing on the UCLA Library’s Digital Collections website. This research is part of an ongoing CSW research project, “Making Invisible Histories Visible: Preserving the Legacy of Lesbian Feminist Activism and Writing in Los Angeles,” with Principal Investigators Kathleen McHugh, CSW DIrector and Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA and Gary Strong, University Librarian at UCLA. Funded in part by an NEH grant, the project is a three-year project to arrange, describe, digitize, and make physically and electronically accessible two major clusters of June Mazer Lesbian Archive collections related to West Coast lesbian/feminist activism and writing since the 1930s.

For more information on this project, visit http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/projects/making-invisible-histories-visible. For more information on the activities of the Mazer, visit http://www.mazerlesbianarchives.org